The Dizziness of Freedom

Human beings possess a remarkable ability to continue living lives that are slowly destroying them. This is evidenced by the frightening speed in which we adapt to emotional distortion, how we learn to perform enthusiasm we no longer feel, how we sustain ambitions that no longer move us, and how we organise entire identities around forms of labour that leave us internally diminished. Over time this adaptation becomes so normalised that the absence of meaning starts feeling less alarming than the possibility of change.

Then, occasionally, something fractures against the grain of these habituatilisations, a passing shock of unusual honesty with yourself that catches like moonlight on water. Suddenly the structure you have built your life around no longer feels psychologically inhabitable, and you are confronted with one of the most destabilising realisations adult life can produce: the understanding that you may have mistaken survival for meaning. Such a realisation is rarely prompted by some huge catastrophe, but instead, a gnawing awareness that somewhere along the way you began organising yourself around the wrong things - the wrong ambitions, the wrong identity, the wrong understanding of what would make your life feel meaningful. The result is a slow, grinding mismatch between who you are and what you keep forcing yourself to become.

What unsettles me most about this feeling is not simply the unhappiness itself, but the speed with which unhappiness transforms into moral judgement. Rarely does the mind interpret existential dissatisfaction neutrally. It does not say: “This structure is not suited to you.” It says: “You have failed at being a person.”

This is perhaps one of the defining psychological features of modern life: we increasingly experience structural problems as personal inadequacies. A difficult job becomes evidence of weakness, exhaustion becomes laziness and alienation becomes incompetence. We internalise conditions that are often philosophical, economic, and social in origin, and reinterpret them as defects in individual character.

I have been thinking about this constantly since starting a new job that almost immediately began eroding my mental state. From the outside, nothing appeared especially wrong because the work was respectable, the people were good and the routines were ordinary. Yet internally I felt a growing sense of unreality, as though I were participating in a version of adulthood that I could perform linguistically but could not inhabit psychologically. What frightened me was not merely that I disliked the work, but the way the experience began reorganising my sense of self. Each difficult day seemed to confirm a deeper suspicion that I was constitutionally unsuited to life itself and my thoughts became increasingly catastrophic and totalising.

I suppose I was experiencing a serious sense of despair and the issue with despair is that it tends to explain things in black and white terms. Despair essentially offers a complete interpretation of reality in which every awkward interaction, every anxious morning, every feeling of depletion becomes incorporated into a single narrative of personal inadequecy. I think this is where contemporary forms of work become philosophically dangerous.

Byung-Chul Han argues that modern capitalist societies no longer primarily operate through external discipline, but through internalised self-exploitation. In traditional thinking (Foucault, Orwell, Marx etc) the individual is seen as a subject oppressed by authority, but now, we experience ourselves as projects perpetually failing to optimise themselves. So the contemporary individual is simultaneously labourer and manager, both exploiting and blaming themselves at once. This produces a particularly intimate form of violence. If an external authority harms you, resistance remains psychologically possible - you can hate the "big man" at the top of the chain, but if you experience yourself as the source of your own inadequacy, there is nowhere for the mind to direct its anger except inwards. The result is a society saturated with exhaustion, but incapable of interpreting that exhaustion politically socially or existentially. And so, burnout becomes an individual medical issue rather than a question about how life itself has been organised, even though we really ought to be interrogating and challenging the latter. What makes this especially difficult is that modern work has become entangled with identity in ways previous societies may have found strange. We are asked constantly to derive meaning, dignity, social legitimacy, and selfhood through labour. One of the first questions adults ask each other is: “What do you do?” Not what do you love, fear, believe, or desire, but what economic function do you perform.

Under these conditions, career confusion easily mutates into ontological confusion. If your work feels meaningless, you begin to suspect that you are meaningless and if you cannot successfully embody your role, you begin to feel incapable of embodying personhood itself.

Mark Fisher writes extensively about this privatisation of distress: the tendency for systemic contradictions to be experienced as personal failures. Depression, anxiety, and exhaustion are often treated as isolated psychological malfunctions rather than rational responses to conditions of precarity, overstimulation, fragmentation, and alienated labour. The individual blames themselves for collapsing under pressures that were perhaps never entirely livable to begin with. What I find striking is how effectively modern culture conceals this contradiction. We continue speaking about career paths as though they emerge from coherent desire rather than contingency, fear, class expectations, survival instincts, and social performance. We speak as though adulthood naturally culminates in vocational certainty but I increasingly suspect that many lives are constructed retrospectively - narratives imposed upon decisions that initially arose from confusion.

Perhaps this is why so many people experience adulthood as fraudulent. Beneath the performance of competence lies improvisation and beneath apparent certainty lies adaptation. Søren Kierkegaard (one of my favourite philosophers) brilliantly describes anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom.” See, I used to misunderstand this phrase because I solely thought freedom meant possibility, expansion, self-creation. I am quickly learning that freedom is also terrifying because it abolishes guarantees. To choose one life is to abandon countless others and every decision excludes another version of the self. So, the modern individual is burdened not only with freedom, but with responsibility for constructing meaning under conditions where no stable framework of meaning universally exists. This is exhausting.

And yet there is something strangely consoling in recognising that confusion may not represent a deviation from life, but one of its central conditions. I think many people secretly believe that they are failing at adulthood because adulthood no longer possesses the coherence it once promised. Traditional structures of meaning - religion, community, class continuity, stable career trajectories - have weakened substantially over the past two centuries, while the modern demand for self-construction has hugely intensified. This means we are told simultaneously that we are free to become anything and yet wholly responsible for whatever we become. The psychological pressure generated by this contradiction is immense and under such conditions, despair becomes understandable.

Not dramatic despair necessarily. Often it emerges quietly, through repetition. Alarm clocks. Commuting. Emails answered with increasing emotional detachment. The slow accumulation of days spent becoming someone unfamiliar to yourself. Eventually the mind begins fantasising not always about death itself, but about escape from the exhausting labour of self-maintenance. I think it is important to speak honestly about this distinction because suicidal thoughts are not always reducible to a simple desire for nonexistence. Sometimes they emerge from profound psychic exhaustion and a longing to be released from a mode of living that has become intolerably estranging. The danger lies partly in how convincing the mind becomes during these periods. Namely, that despair collapses temporality and transforms transient conditions into permanent conclusions.

But human lives are rarely as fixed as despair insists they are. People change slowly, then suddenly, entire identities dissolve and reform over time, careers once experienced as essential are abandoned, ambitions that once structured existence lose their emotional authority. Human beings are remarkably capable of surviving versions of themselves they once believed permanent. Perhaps what we call a “crisis” is sometimes simply the painful recognition that an old structure of meaning can no longer sustain us.

Increasingly, I suspect many forms of contemporary despair are connected not to individual pathology alone, but to the difficulty of constructing a meaningful self within systems that continuously reduce human value to productivity.

And yet despite all this, people continue.

They leave jobs, they reconstruct identities, they survive periods that once appeared unsurvivable. Meaning returns unpredictably as it is lost. In fact history - both collective and personal - is full of people who mistook transformation for destruction while living through it.

I am trying to remember this: that a wrong path is not a ruined life, that confusion is not evidence of deficiency and that perhaps part of being human is repeatedly discovering that the self you constructed cannot accompany you any further. Of course there is grief and pain in that discovery but perhaps there is also freedom in it too.